


an ocean of people and places we’ve chosen

by Anonymous



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Sugar Daddy, Capitalist Overlord Ben Solo, College Student Rey (Star Wars), Established Relationship, F/M, Marriage Proposal, Power Imbalance, Rey Needs A Hug (Star Wars), lotsa cursing, their collective favorite word is fuck, they're toxic as hell and they know it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-14
Updated: 2021-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-22 07:42:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30035355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Rey's future is slipping out of her control. She can do nothing but watch as it slowly falls into the much older and very wealthy Ben Solo's grasp.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 4
Kudos: 30
Collections: Anonymous





	an ocean of people and places we’ve chosen

**Author's Note:**

> title from zella day's hunnie pie

Rey feels herself crack into hardened pieces underneath the oppressive weight of her questionable decisions. There is no one coming to save her from the naivety of her past.

There is no one responsible for the smeared mascara painting her eyes with shadows or the tear tracks glistening on her face other than herself. And maybe him. But Rey is the one who let him do it. She shouldn’t have, but this was only obvious in hindsight. 

She met him when she was nineteen and hadn’t known any better. It was a mistake to hold his piercing gaze and agree to go home with him that first night. She sees that now, but still can’t bring herself to leave.

Every time she stares into his eyes, she’s still a clueless kid incapable of making decisions that aren’t self-destructive. The past between them holds her captive, its co-conspirator the knowledge that no one will ever understand her the way he does.

She leans against the cool metal of the refrigerator door, the rigidity of the hardwood floor underneath her feet grounding her back to his apartment. It is, after all, his. Just like everything else she owns. 

Rey swings open the refrigerator door and closes her fingers around the glass neck of a white wine bottle. Popping off the cork and bringing it to her lips, she slams the door with a rattle and slides onto the floor. 

Ben wouldn’t approve of her downing cheap cooking wine on the kitchen floor in one of his ratty old shirts and a pair of panties. Rey doesn’t particularly give a shit.

“Fuck you,” she spits out, taking another swig. “Always wanting me to be something I’m not. Stupid bastard.” 

It was always something with him. Rey could never just peacefully exist without him at her side, pushing her forward into places she didn’t necessarily want to go. Metaphorically and literally.

There were the fancy dinner parties that would end with screaming matches in elevators that descended past enough floors to trace the outlines of clouds. She would always make some misstep, no matter how hard she tried. 

***

Emboldened by the anger simmering off of the carefully constructed facade she abandoned once in private, Rey screamed, “Then why did you bring me? Why did you drag me to this fucking snooze fest if I’m such an embarrassment?”

He got even angrier and his eyes narrowed. “Don’t put words in my mouth!”

Rey only said what he was thinking. It didn’t make it any less true. “Then stop ordering me around! I fucking hate these things. Leave me at home next time if it’s so much work to babysit me!”

“Is support from my girlfriend too much to ask for? Can you really not restrain yourself for two hours to seem even slightly respectable?”

“Oh, am I just that unworthy of respect to you? Is that why you treat me like shit? Because you don’t respect me?” Rey taunted.

He closed the space between them, closing in on her so that she was pushed into the railing lining the sides of the claustrophobic metal box. “Can you stop being an antagonistic bitch for one fucking second?” Ben snarled as she sneered at him.

“If you hate me so much, you should find someone else to put up with you! Maybe some nice girl your own age so everyone at these work parties will stop giving you such a hard time for fucking twenty-year-olds!” Rey shouted back, pushing him off of her.

She sprinted out of the elevator and past the lobby as soon as the little ding filled her ears. Rey left his smoldering gaze far behind her as she kicked her high heels off and continued into the frigid air of the night.

She’d left him carrying her coat and wouldn’t last long out here. He was following behind her, slowed down by his muscle mass and hulking frame. Rey didn’t care.

He could follow her all night and she still wouldn’t want to continue that conversation. If it could even be categorized as a conversation. There was more screaming than talking in a lot of their interactions. Too many.

Rey was crying again. She wasn’t sure if it was his fault or not. The streetlights and cars rushing by didn’t stop for the frantic girl and the man following her closely with a barrage of her name. “Rey, stop! Slow down! What are you doing?”

No one cared. She wasn’t even sure if she did. 

The cold air that had recently been filled with a barrage of icy flakes bit into the bare skin of her shoulder and back, ridiculously on display in her cocktail dress. The one he’d bought for her. 

She could deal with the biting numbness creeping up in her extremities, but Rey’s feet were starting to ache from the repeated strikes against the uneven and ice-coated pavement. There was a line she wasn’t sure if she dared to cross.

Would proving some mundane point be worth frostbite on her feet? Would the symbolic gesture of refusing to run back into his arms leverage against what she was doing to herself?

She ran until her face started to itch with cold and sweat bearing the faint odor of hairspray lined her brow, her elaborate braided style having long fallen to ruins at the nape of her neck. The acrid smell of the city and its swelled egged her rebellion on. 

“You’re going to freeze! Rey, please!” He’d started to beg and Rey was slowing down in exhaustion. She’d been on the track team before meeting him. She probably could’ve kept going if she hadn’t quit. But she’d changed a lot since meeting Ben.

She stopped dead in her tracks, nearly tumbling to the concrete floor as the interrupted momentum tried to claim her. Wobbling, she let herself be enveloped in his crushing grasp. Let him wrap her in the sleek white coat that complemented the pale emerald of her dress. 

Rey could smell the cologne on the sleeves of his suit as they passed her face to rub against the crisscrossing straps of her dress. It was an expensive suit. It could have bought her a lot of instant ramen when she’d been living as a broke college student.

She didn’t eat instant ramen anymore. He did the grocery shopping. 

“I’m sorry,” she choked out, extending the first strands of a possible reconciliation. Rey didn’t have anywhere else to go other than with him. 

They’d filled her spot in the dorms and the crushing student debt looming over her would consume her without Ben’s monthly payments. And unlike him, she didn’t have generations of old money waiting patiently in a trust fund for her.

So she went back to the only thing she knew. The only thing she loved: him.

“Me, too,” he whispered into her hair, pulling her even tighter into his chest to the point she could barely breathe. Definitely not escape, either. 

***

She belongs to him, entirely. There is no denying it. Everything she has is at his discretion, because of his grace. 

She is a guest in her own damn home. The cold interior and marble counter of their kitchen is his design. She moved in years ago and there’s still nothing in the apartment that denotes her presence.

Rey is subject to Ben’s whims. He wields his power over her lovingly, but the chasm between them still makes her uneasy. It is so easy to fall in. Accidentally or on purpose. 

Her independence had retreated into the distance so subtly that she hadn’t noticed it until it was nothing more than a distant memory. It feels like there’s an ocean of swells and storms between her and the person she used to be. Rey manages a fragmented smile at the wistful recollection of her running through university parking lots with kids her age armed with water balloons. Finn and Poe and Rose and a sea of other faces. She misses them. She hasn't spoken to her college friends since she’d changed her number and gone on Ben’s phone plan. 

This is her last-ditch effort to hold on to what little agency she has left. She knows it will fail and continues to gulp down mouthfuls of wine that will undoubtedly be accompanied by a nasty hangover.

Rey is vaguely aware that she should get up off of the floor and leave. If she had any sense of self-preservation, she would gather her few things, exit his apartment, and never come back. Changing her phone number and cutting off any mutual friends would be a nice gesture, too.

She’s not going to. This is her last out from a lifetime of mundane submission to what other people want from her, but Rey will not take it. 

Maybe it’s fear of failing. Or being without him. It might even be hope that she can mold herself around Ben’s wishes so seamlessly that she’ll find fulfillment. In the end, it doesn’t matter. 

The reason is insignificant as the jumbled clinking of a key unlocking the front door rings out in her ears, an inescapable reminder of him. The cat stirs at the sound, padding out of their bedroom and rushing to the door in a flash of white fur. Ben even holds greater sway with the cat.

It ignores her ugly sobbing on the kitchen floor but runs to him the second he gets home. He doesn’t even like the animal! Stupid cat.

She tries to hide the defeated swell of tears in her eyes, which can’t quite seem to focus on any one thing. It doesn’t work. 

Ben stumbles into the room, clicking the door shut and locking it. It’s not difficult for him to follow the sound of muffled sniffling and peer over the kitchen island to her huddled form.

He sighs loudly, ignoring the diligent pawing of their cat at his pant legs, shuffling around the table to her side. He has to step around the shattered pieces of a crystal vase on the floor, but he is unfazed. He’s the one who put them there.

He sinks to the floor beside her, where they both stare at the cabinets underneath the sink instead of each other. Rey scoots a couple of inches away from him, but he follows.

Ben smells like hard liquor, but grabs the wine bottle out of her hands and sets it down beside him. “You’re a fucking hypocrite,” she remarks. Rey doesn’t try to get it back. That would be futile.

“I know.” The cat curls up in his lap, a small ball of fluffy white against the black of his pant legs.

“It’s unfair. You’re unfair.” She finally looks at him. His hair is plastered to his face and he slouches with exhaustion that weighs down the muscles of his face. Rey would feel guilty, but she probably looks worse. She’s never quite been able to pull off the “windblown raccoon” look.

“You have an exam tomorrow,” he says softly. She hates that he’s right. That he knows she won’t graduate college in a few months if she doesn’t pass.

“I don’t know why I tell you anything. Ever.” Rey wipes some of the black smears off of her eyelids, making a mental note to buy waterproof makeup from now on.

Ben buries his face in his hands and rubs his temples for a moment. Rey can’t do anything to mend the broken silence between them; it’s all in his hands. Just like the gigantic refrigerator they didn’t need in the first place that was delivered when he was at work a few months ago. She wasn’t strong enough to do anything, so all Rey could do was wait until he got home to move it for her. 

Eventually, he speaks again. “I shouldn’t have sprung that on you. I’m sorry.”

Rey will be the one to compromise, as usual. She will bend to his will and he will get what he wants, yet again.

She glances over at him and sees his eyes are sincere. He has started to gently stroke the cat sitting on his thighs with a paternal manner that makes Rey shudder in fear of what it foreshadows. “I overreacted. I’m sorry, too.”

It wasn’t an overreaction. He was asking her to give up the last thing that was entirely hers. To make his ownership of her official and permanent. She had been completely terrified. 

But it was now clear to Rey that it really wouldn’t make much of a difference. It was easier to not resist. The presence of something on a piece of paper wouldn’t trap her any more than she had already done to herself. It was just a last name, not even one that she was particularly attached to.

Ben makes no effort to speak again, so Rey continues. “I was scared when you got down on one knee, but I’ve had some time to think. You’re right; it’s not too early. I’ll be twenty two in a month and that’s plenty old enough.”

She would be engaged and likely married before graduating from college. Rey will have a lifetime ahead of her to possibly regret this, but she is committing to this choice.

His eyes widen and his head whips to the left to meet her heavily-lidded gaze. ‘Wh-what?”

She laughs softly. “Ben, I’m saying yes. I’ll marry you.” 

Unbridled joy appears on his face like rays of light shining through the clouds in the early morning. “Really?”

“Do I have to say it again?”

Ben fumbles through his pocket for the midnight blue box, slipping the thin band of platinum bearing a sharply cut diamond out of the lining and onto her ring finger. Grinning like a fool, he leans in and mumbles, “No, you don’t.”

The kiss tastes like whiskey and white wine and wonder about the possibility of imminent regret. He cups her jaw in his hands as the cat crawls off of his lap and he pulls her into it. Losing herself in his grip, Rey knows that he will never let her go. She’s not entirely sure whether or not she wants him to.


End file.
